It takes a village

Some years ago now, R and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of January. As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu, the hotel was horrible, and it snowed! But one thing was very good, and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.

On Monday, you may remember, K showed us some pictures of various Christmas cribs, and there was an exhibition of them at Clapham church a few weeks ago. But in Provence they do things a bit differently, as this picture shows: It’s a whole village. It’s not a very high-resolution picture, but there are lots of little figures, not just the Holy Family, although they are there, too, but all the villagers going around their daily business. I took this picture, which is a much better resolution, at an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace a couple of weeks ago.

It doesn’t show the village in quite the same detail, but just look at all the people! You’ve got the Holy Family, of course, and then there is another stable with what looks like pigs in it – improbable, really, as Jewish people don’t eat pork or pig products. But you have all the villagers going on with their lives. I couldn’t spend as long as I wanted looking at it, as time was getting on and we needed to catch a bus back to our campsite, but it’s one of those things that the more you look, the more you see. There’s someone with his cart, and someone setting out to go fishing or sailing in a dinghy, and lots of people just standing around and chatting; a water-carrier is going over the bridge, and so on.

I love this Provençal tradition. You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not isolated. We tend to think of them as travelling alone – just Mary, Joseph and the donkey – but of course they would have gone to Bethlehem with a group of other travellers; it wasn’t safe, else. And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating the animal part of the house from the human part, and there would probably have been a great many women, mostly relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards. We don’t think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets, but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.

Yes, there were signs that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most inconvenient time. Yes, the shepherds came to visit – but they might well have been family, don’t you think? And yes, Anna and Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit, and knew that they had seen their salvation. But from the human point of view, Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did – they had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God – the first and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over him, these always invoking Elijah. Everybody did that, if they could.

And then they went back to Nazareth – again, travelling in a party for safety – and Jesus would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters. He would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up, and in due course to stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained; he’d have had to learn when not to talk, and when he needed to sit still and listen. He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age, and learnt to read and write, especially the Scriptures. He’d probably have hung round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry – and probably some interesting words to say when he hit is thumb with a hammer!

And each year they would go to Jerusalem, to the Temple. Again, they would travel in groups and caravans. At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s back, and then kept close to his parents, but as he grew older, he’d be off with his friends, running ahead and being told not to go out of sight, or lagging behind and being told to keep up. They’d gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional songs.

And then the kids were coming twelve years old. Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered a man at the age of 13, and from then on could be asked to read, and comment on, the Scriptures at any time. These days they have a ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for girls, where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures, translates it, and then preaches on it – my daughter went to a friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed by her performance. They also have a party, either immediately afterwards or later the same day.

In Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy – not girls, back in the day, alas – every boy approaching his 13^th birthday knew he could be called on at any time after his birthday. Their teachers would have been focussing on this during the school year, and probably some of the boys were getting nervous.

That year, they all went up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and then gathered together to go home again. And it wasn’t until next day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t! His parents had assumed he was off with his friends as usual, but suddenly, horrifyingly, nobody had seen him. His parents rushed back to Jerusalem – they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an emergency – and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion with the scribes.

You see, as Jesus had studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them. God helped them become real to him. And, of course, Jesus had endless questions. I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they didn't know all that much themselves. And his teachers, perhaps, didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions – or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than they cared to do in an academic environment. And when he reached Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with the scribes in the Temple. They knew. They could answer his questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not. They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his perspicacity at such a young age.

I hope the scribes didn’t laugh at him; it's not clear from the text, but they might have. But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the point.

And Jesus, typically adolescent, totally forgets about going home, forgets that his parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets to wonder how he's going to get home, or even where he's going to sleep – or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was enough. Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s quite sure.

And when his parents finally find him, like any adolescent, he says “You don’t understand!” And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s business!” Poor Joseph – not very kind, was it?

We aren’t told what happened next, whether they hurried to catch up with their original caravan, or had to wait until the next one was going in that direction. We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few days when they did get home, or what.

Come to that, we aren’t told whether he actually knew anything about who he was. He’d probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life, but then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest, something came alight in him. He began to catch glimpses of God, of That Which Is, of the Thought that Thought the World… and he longed and longed to know more. Later on, of course, he would realise that searching the Scriptures was not enough. Remember what he said to the Pharisees: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."  He knew that you needed more than just the words on the page – but at twelve years old, this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of ignoring anything else.

But why does this matter? For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine. He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head, like some of the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done. He didn’t grow up in splendid isolation, just with his parents, and later, with his mother alone. Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel, the family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile, they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had family there, rather than just choosing it at random. The thing is, he grew up in the midst of other people. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and Jesus grew up in that sort of village! He had lots of examples to follow, both of how to behave and of how not to. I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later. But he did grow up loving God.

It’s not always easy, at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it? We see him as divine – and so he is, but he is also human. His experiences may not have been exactly the same as ours, as he grew up in a very different culture. All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d be glued to his phone, getting WhatsApp messages from his friends every few minutes, spending hours making a 12-days-of-Christmas chocolate calendar for his parents, grumbling that he and his friends aren’t allowed to go to Camden Town without a grownup – oh no, wait, that’s my 13-year-old grandson, but you get the picture! And I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine, because it makes him – at least, I find it does – much more approachable, much more real, much more able to empathise with me, and plead my cause with God. He’s not just the baby in the manger; he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the exclusion of all else; at that, he’s not even the still figure on the Cross. He is any and all of those things, and he is our Lord and Saviour. Amen.